Jago (49 page)

‘Peace,’ Dolar burped, hand pressed to his bleeding shoulder.

Paul pushed away from the tree, out of range. The gunman had reloaded, and snapped shut his double-barrelled gun. He yanked both triggers, and there was a flash as the gun misfired. He pebble-dashed the ground with shot and, crying, dropped his weapon, kicking it with bare feet. He clutched his bruised toes and sobbed.

Dolar’s smile spread wider. ‘Peace.’

* * *

Having slept the day away, Maskell awoke under the moon, family about him, erection stabbing the sky. Slowly, he pulled his roots out of the earth, refreshed by the goodness he had absorbed, and stood up. Sue-Clare, Hannah and Jethro stood too, in their places. Something was missing, though, and the gap nagged Maskell. His knob twitched towards the village. He saw fires in the distance, a glow outlining the hump of the hill.

‘Jerm,’ he said. ‘Jerm, Jerm, Swallowing Sperm.’

* * *

Jenny and Kate helped Beloved to His room. He was exhausted, drained. It was hard to remember He too was confined for the most part to a body of flesh and blood. The handmaidens laid Him on the bed.

‘Come to me, my Sister, my spouse,’ He said.

Jenny instinctively slipped towards the bed, pulling covers aside. Then she realized He meant the new Sister-Love.

‘Bring Sister Hazel,’ she told Kate.

* * *

Erskine forced Teddy to the ground in the middle of the road, and pulled his arm back and forth. Lytton tried to protest.

‘It’s better than he deserves,’ Draper said.

There was an audience for all this, shouting advice. Erskine was playing to the crowd, hurting Teddy for their pleasure. Raine, the black policeman, was standing by, doubtful but not enough to interfere.

Lytton felt someone pulling his arm, and turned to see Pam, moving fast. The girl tried to kiss him, tongue pressing past his teeth, almost choking him. He fought free, and she collapsed against him, arms around his neck, anchoring him. Draper and Erskine were fifty yards away, carrying Teddy between them. Then there were people in the way, and he couldn’t see them any more. Pam pressed herself against him, cooing endearments. He found her harder to pull off than a multisuckered clam. Every time he detached one of her hands, another part of her would latch on to him. It was a strange dance.

Up the road, a bottle with a tongue of fire flickering from its neck flew out of a top-floor window and shattered against the asphalt, spreading a circle of burning liquid.

Lytton threw himself against the grass verge, pulling Pam with him. They rolled together into a depression, and she was on top of him, kissing his cheeks and lips, pushing his head down. For a moment, he thought of giving in. Then, he fought again.

* * *

Kate fame for the postulant and Susan didn’t fight to keep her. Hazel, floating and smiling, was easily led away. Before she went to Beloved, she said, ‘We share Love’, and Susan had wanted again to be sick. With Karen, she watched Hazel and Kate go upstairs.

‘When the festival is over,’ Karen announced, ‘I’m leaving.’

‘We’re all leaving,’ Susan said. ‘When the festival’s over, it’ll all be over.’

She promised herself.

* * *

X and Ingraham were on their knees, faces and fists dripping, breathing like old men, barely able to inflict each blow, taking longer and longer to work up to the next one. Jeremy was huddled behind the tyres. There was a fire in the road. Fights were going on. The man from the Agapemone had been fighting with a red-haired girl in a shallow ditch. He had won his fight, and was staggering off.

The dry grass of one verge was on fire. Whatever had happened to Daddy had happened to other people. Some of them were even changing. A scary clown stalked past, double-joined legs like stilts, exaggerated face not make-up or a mask. Jeremy knew there was no point in running away. He would just be bringing attention to himself.

Ingraham was lying down now, feebly trying to get up. X joined his hands over his head in victory, then fell forwards on to his friend. In their heap, they lay.

From out of nowhere, Lisa Steyning appeared in a nightie. She pulled his hair, making him ouch, and ran off into the dark, slippers flapping. That was the last thing he would put up with. He scrambled out from his nest of tyres and ran after Lisa’s filmy nightie. She was only a girl. When he caught up, he’d smack her face until she bled, and kick her until she cried.

* * *

Jessica tried to cuddle him, but Ferg battered her off. She was turning into a whining hag. The invisible invaders had landed, and he heard them clumping through the village. He saw dents in the road where they’d trod, weight cracking the tarmac, crushing the cat’s-eyes. Everyone was panicking. They would come for him and Paul soon.

* * *

Hazel lay down beside Beloved, content and complete. At last, she belonged. She was Loved for herself as she was, not for someone else’s idea of her. She was too happy to sleep.

* * *

Allison knew she’d done what she had to. She put the stiletto back in its sheath on Jazz’s hip, and stood. The small tear over the girl’s heart expanded, pinpoint of blood glowing like molten metal. The tiny bubble was the focus of the fire. She took Terry’s hand, and Mike Toad’s, and led them back. They stood at the crest of the crater, watching Jazz. She convulsed, face bright red, casting her own light, the blood bubble so bright it was hard to look at. Jazz was swallowing her own aura.

* * *

Susan looked down the hallway, and lashed out with her mind. Panels on either side of the door exploded into fragments, which burst outward in a shower. The frames smoked, and she felt petty satisfaction with her destructive potential. Karen goggled at her.

‘Abracadabra,’ she said, bitterly.

* * *

Lisa’s nightie stood out, blonde hair streaming down it, as the small shape ran. Jeremy knew he could catch her, even if she did try to get lost in the crowd. Lisa pushed through a gate into the Pottery, and Jeremy followed. The Bleaches had a big garden. He remembered it from a barbecue his parents had taken him to. Lisa had teased him and kicked him when no one was looking. He’d been sent home early for throwing orange juice over her party dress, and she’d huddled giggling with Hannah as Daddy, angry, carted him off to a smacking, no supper and an early night.

It was dark in the garden, but he still saw the nightie. Lisa was heading up the hill, but had slowed down. She was too weedy to want to run all the way to the top. Jeremy was getting a stitch. Lisa stopped still, and turned to look back. He imagined her tongue poked out.

‘I’ll get you,’ he said to himself.

He ran up to her, slowing down, making fists. She walked towards him, and dread struck him down. The blonde wig came loose and was thrown away. The nightie was shucked. He found himself looking at the vacant, drooling face of the Evil Dwarf, and his bladder gave way. Giggling like Lisa, the Evil Dwarf came for him.

* * *

Paul knew it’d be safest to get off the road. But there was fighting between the tree and the Pottery. He wondered about Hazel, about how she was. With all this commotion, they couldn’t have had time to finish their ceremony. Perhaps she had not been initiated after all. Perhaps she was savable. He bit down, and his tooth flared.

* * *

Jazz was inches off the ground now, head lolling back. Light around her throbbed. Allison saw the blood bubble burst inwards, and tried to look away. It was a sudden explosion of darkness, sucking everything into a tiny spot. There was a crack, and a violet discharge that hurt her eyes. Where Jazz had been, there was nothing.

‘A
t the end of the programme, it was in Westminster Abbey, a hundred feet high, with eyes and tentacles and slime and…’

‘Nahhh,’ Reggie sneered at him, ‘youm makin’ it up.’

‘No, it was on the television,’ Maurice insisted, ‘last night.’

The boys were out on the wetlands, bored. It was August, school weeks away. Reggie was two years older, and his dad worked on the farm. The Major didn’t really like him playing with Reggie, and he sometimes wondered himself why he put up with the bulky, sulky, bullying boy. He somehow always ended up wading barelegged through stinging nettles, raising fierce red blotches on his skin that took days to subside. Reggie was often hanging around the farm at a loose end, although Maurice had never been invited to the Gilpin house. There were few children in Alder, and Reggie, because his dad worked for the Major, was the only one who didn’t stay away from the newcomer as if he carried the plague. The Maskells had been in Alder a year, since the Major had bought the farm, and they were still newcomers. Maurice’s father liked it that way, believing it important that everybody knew their place. ‘The rich man in his castle,’ he explained, ‘the poor man at the gate, He made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.’ The Major liked to stride around the farm, quirt at his side, making sure everything and everyone was in their place.

‘Tellyvision,’ Reggie said, spitting a lump at a cowflop. ‘Load a’ rubbish, boy.’

‘No,’ Maurice said patiently, ‘the monster was real. I saw it.’

He had, too, just before the names of the actors came up, and the eerie music he couldn’t whistle sounded out, sending a chill straight to the base of his spine. Lying awake last night, with his torch on under the bedclothes, he had decided the Quatermass Experiment was the scariest monster to which he’d ever been exposed. It was worse than the silver robot in
The Day the Earth Stood Still,
worse than the Nazi war criminals Yank Steyning had told him about, worse than the werewolves in the American comics his father had burned. It sat there in the rafters of the abbey, writhing and dripping. Next week would be the last episode, and Maurice thought he wouldn’t be able to get a real night’s sleep until it had been transmitted and the world was put to rights. He imagined the monster frozen in the abbey for a week, waiting for Professor Quatermass to come and put it in its place. Next week, he hoped, the professor would find some way of destroying the monster, and the world would be saved. If not, then it would be the end of all things, and everyone would be turned into tentacled, many-eyed monstrosities. It was too dreadful to think about. No one would know their place then, because there wouldn’t be places any more, or people to know them...

‘Where’d thic bleddy monster come frum then?’

‘The spaceman turned into the monster. Remember the spaceman?’

Reggie sneered. Maurice had been explaining all summer what was happening with Professor Quatermass and the spaceman. Professor Quatermass was a scientist, brisk and dedicated, and he took no nonsense from the soldiers and politicians who got in his way. The soldiers reminded Maurice of the Major, snapping orders and not paying attention, sure everything was in its place while the world disappeared under writhing slime. Reggie pretended he wasn’t interested in Professor Quatermass, but when Maurice finished the explanation of this week’s instalment, he always asked questions, digging for extra details.

‘When the cactus got into the spaceman, he turned into a giant cactus monster.’

‘With they tentacles?’

‘Yes,’ Maurice said, ‘lots of tentacles.’

The only time Reggie Gilpin had seen television was the Coronation, when the Major had invited everyone in the village to watch the great event on their receiver. Maurice’s parents had the only set in Alder. That day, the vicar and the other farmers had a party afterwards. All the children had stared well into the evening at the bubbly screen with its fuzzy little people. Maurice had been bored rigid by the Coronation, which was just people talking and wandering in and out of Westminster Abbey. If there was going to be anything in Westminster Abbey, he preferred it to be a hundred-foot-high monster from outer space.

A herd of cows milled around in the field, stupidly chewing grass, full udders sloshing. Reggie’s dad had been working steadily over the past few weeks, stringing up wires in the fields. Yank Steyning, an American who had come over for the war, helped out, wearing thick cowboy gloves and talking like Tim Holt. Maurice always wondered when Yank, who’d married Anne Starkey, would saddle up and ride on like Tim Holt, vanishing over the horizon on a horse, wandering to the next town for the next adventure. Reggie’s father and Yank had done a thorough job, but the wires were pretty useless fences. A cow could easily knock one down. A series of iron poles held up the wire, which was two feet off the ground where it wasn’t sagging, and they were already sinking at funny angles into the wet ground.

The Major had told him not to mess around with the wires or else he’d get hurt. Maurice knew what that meant. Whenever he did anything his father told him not to, he got hurt. The Major kept his quirt, which was like a tasselled riding crop, with him all the time. He’d used the quirt in the Far East during the war. When Maurice wouldn’t go to bed or broke anything or talked back, his father would tell him to drop his shorts and underpants and bend over, then he would strap him across the backside with the quirt, always ten times. It certainly hurt.

‘Did they cactus come frum out a’ space?’

‘No, the hospital where they put the spaceman when he came back ill.’

‘Sounds stupid t’me.’

Maurice didn’t quite understand how the cactus and the spaceman had become combined in the monster.

‘I suppose it was the radiation.’

‘Like they bomb buggers?’

Maurice nodded. ‘Yes, atomic radiation.’

Reggie’s upper lip, skilled in the art of the curl, expressed his opinion of Maurice’s stupidity, and he spat again, apparently hawking a fist-sized gobbet of slime in with the spittle. Reggie always treated Maurice as if the younger boy were a mongoloid idiot, but Maurice knew Reggie was near the bottom of his class. They were at the same school, but when he took his next exams, Reggie would be going to the secondary modern in Achelzoy, while the Major had already made arrangements to send him away to the school—the posh school, Reggie called it—he’d gone to himself. That had nothing to do with being clever. That had to do with tradition, the Major had explained to him. Reggie told him that at the posh school, he’d have to do five hours of homework every night and take cold showers at six in the morning. He’d complained to his mother about this prospective torture, but she told him Reggie didn’t know anything and was just showing his enviousness.